Robbery Under Law is Evelyn Waugh's account of his trip to Mexico and what he found there. It's not a pure travelogue, as he does focus on history and then current events like the nationalization of the petroleum industry and the ongoing persecution of Christians by the government. However, he went late enough that he missed most of the great excitement and instead had to content himself with viewing the results of over two decades of civil war and political upheaval. Suffice to say, Waugh being Waugh, he does not approve. However, he is more positive and objective on some points than I expected him to be.

This isn't a book to jump into without having some background about the issues Waugh is discussing, and Graham Green's earlier travelogue The Lawless Roads is arguably more exciting, but if you have an interest in Waugh or in contemporary reactions to the Mexican Civil War, you'll want to get to this one eventually. ( )

Explorer, film-maker and writer Hugh Thomson has chosen to discuss Evelyn Waugh’s Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson , on FiveBooks (http://five-books.com) as one of the top five on his subject - Mexico, saying that:

“… He sees that Mexico’s history is not as simple as ‘noble Indians and brutal Europeans’ and thinks Mexicans should celebrate their post-Columbian inheritance as much as their Aztec history. There is a fair amount of ‘dog eat dog’ in the Mexico Waugh describes – it was a tough place to live and work, and Waugh shows this with no sentimentality and occasional relish..…”.

The full interview is available here: http://thebrowser.com/books/interviews/hugh-thomson ( )